➔ Leadership in practice

In 2006, Ford Motor Company had just posted a $12.7 billion annual loss, the largest in its history at the time. Market share was eroding and confidence across Detroit was thin.

Bill Ford Jr. effectively fired himself as CEO to bring in Alan Mulally, an aerospace executive from Boeing known for running large, complex programmes with a calm head. His lack of Detroit pedigree drew criticism, but he came with experience aligning stressed systems around a single plan.

Mulally introduced a weekly Business Plan Review. Senior leaders were required to present performance using colour-coded charts: green for on track, yellow for at risk, red for off track. In the early meetings, every slide was green. “If the company was losing billions, how could everything be fine?” Mulally wondered.

Eventually, Mark Fields, then head of the Americas division, showed a red slide. A major vehicle launch was off schedule. In Ford’s culture at the time, executives were accustomed to presenting optimism upward. Red was rare, and the room tightened when it appeared.

The red card was met with silence. Then, Mulally began to applaud. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s great visibility.” He would later summarise the principle more bluntly: “You can’t manage a secret….Facts are friendly.”

Under pressure, organisations tend to narrow. Information gets filtered. Problems are softened before they travel. Mulally’s response interrupted that reflex. Red no longer implied failure. It meant the issue could be addressed because a resilient organisation can’t be built on lies.

Over time, more red appeared. Conversations became more candid and decisions more grounded in reality. Before the financial crisis hit in 2008, Mulally had already raised roughly $23 billion by mortgaging Ford’s assets, giving the company liquidity when credit markets froze. Ford avoided bankruptcy and did not require a federal bailout.

The Ford turnaround began when a leader created space for uncomfortable facts to become more visible and kept the company steady when the slides turned red.

The thread running through this week’s newsletter is resilience.

Enjoy,

Hugh

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 To raise that $23 billion, Ford mortgaged almost everything, including factories, real estate, patents, and even the iconic blue oval logo itself, which legally belonged to the banks until Ford earned back an investment‑grade credit rating in 2012.

#2 In the week after Mark Fields’ first red slide, executives came back with decks that Mulally later said were splattered with “more red than a crime scene.”

#3 Ford posted a $2.7 billion profit in 2009, its first full‑year profit since 2005, after over $30 billion of losses from 2006–2008. Ford reported pre‑tax profit of about $8.8 billion for 2011.

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

In Messy, Tim Harford tells the brilliant story of a famous concert that nearly didn’t happen.

It’s 1975, and Keith Jarrett arrives in Cologne, exhausted after an overnight drive, to play the biggest solo gig of his career. He suffers from back problems and is in pain. He’s agreed to play a late-night concert and requested a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial, a concert grand with depth and range. Instead, a small rehearsal piano waits on stage.

The piano is in poor condition. The upper register is thin and brittle. The bass is weak. Keys stick. Pedals barely respond. Jarrett walks back to the car, refusing to play. Eventually, the 17-year-old promoter, Vera Brandes, who hired the Köln Opera House for this gig, persuades him to return: “Keith, if you don’t play this concert, I’ll be fucked. And you’ll be fucked too.”

Faced with an instrument that will not cooperate, Jarrett adapts. He avoids the unreliable high notes and concentrates on the middle of the keyboard. He emphasises rhythm to compensate for the weak bass. His physical discomfort pushes him toward a more percussive, driving style. At points in the performance, he stands to get more power in his play. The constraints narrow his options and, in doing so, intensify his focus.

The recording, released as The Köln Concert, sells more than three million copies and becomes the best-selling solo jazz album in history and the best‑selling solo piano album of any genre, with sales estimates ranging from about 3–4 million copies.

It’s a vivid example of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls antifragility. In Antifragile, he distinguishes resilience from antifragility. Resilience absorbs stress and returns to baseline. Antifragility improves because of stress.

The limitations redirected his playing and shaped the outcome. For leaders, the implication can feel uncomfortable. Removing every obstacle may create smooth execution, but creative breakthroughs often emerge when people must adapt under pressure. Not every broken piano needs fixing.

Notes:

#1 Vera Brandes was Germany’s youngest ever promoter. Aged 16, while still at school, she met Ronnie Scott at a jazz festival, and he asked her to book him a two-week tour of Germany.

#2 The opera house played a four-note jingle on the tannoy before concerts, instructing patrons to take their seats. The first few notes that Jarrett plays in the concert repeat that chime. He continues to develop this chime throughout, much to the joy of the crowd.

#3 The 2025 movie Köln 75 tells the story of the gig from the perspective of the young promoter.

➔ Lifting the lid on what’s happening inside our brains when we do creative work

I’ve been in the US for the last week, watching the Winter Olympics with American commentary. The hype around Ilia Malinin, who I’d not heard of before, was justified. Unbeaten since late 2023 and winner of back-to-back world titles, he attempts things other skaters avoid and makes them look routine.

On Friday, he entered the free skate leading by more than five points. He didn’t start well. Small errors appeared, triggering a chain reaction. Landings tightened. The automated skills that usually obey him bailed at the worst moment. A series of mistakes and falls followed, resulting in an eighth-place finish.

At that level, the body is never calm. Heart rate rises. Cortisol circulates. Muscles prime for explosive movement. The brain’s threat system, centred around the amygdala, scans for danger. If that surge is interpreted as a risk to status or identity, attention narrows and fine motor control degrades. Precision sports expose even minor interference.

Now picture a more experienced athlete, such as Serena Williams, on Centre Court at Wimbledon. Match point. Same elevated heart rate. Same biochemical cocktail. But with more years of experience, her automations tend to hold. She once described that state in four words: “Pressure is a privilege.”

That sentence is cognitive reappraisal. The prefrontal cortex assigns a different meaning to the same physiological surge. The body remains activated, but the alarm softens. Experience builds reference points. The reframed story attached to stress becomes more stable.

Malinin does not lack talent, but on the night he needed a library of reframes.

We’ve all encountered much quieter versions of these moments. A pitch that doesn’t go to plan. A room that goes silent when bold work doesn’t land. The pulse quickens and the mind searches for interpretation. If stress is interpreted as exposure, performance tightens. If it is interpreted as privilege, energy becomes usable.

Like Mulally refaming bad news as “great visibility” or Williams reframing “pressure and privilege”, resilient leaders apply cognitive reframing quickly enough to stay in control.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 Ilia Malinin came into these Olympics not just as a champion, but as the only skater in history to land a fully rotated quadruple Axel in competition, and he’s done it multiple times.

#2 Elite skaters routinely compete with resting heart rates in the 140–160 range on the ice, meaning what feels like panic to most people is just “normal operating mode” for them – what changes is the story they attach to that state.

#3 Timing‑wise, brain imaging suggests prefrontal regions ramp up early in a reappraisal attempt, while amygdala down‑regulation shows up later in the trial, implying that the “new story” needs a moment to propagate down into the threat system.

🔗 Quick links to more stories 📖

How to talk to yourself - Self-talk is a proven way to boost motivation, think clearly and process your emotions. These tips from Psyche will help you use it well. (8 min read)

It pays to be an optimist - A study of 140,000 people across sixteen countries found that more optimistic individuals tend to save more money, and this link remained strong even after accounting for income, personality traits, and financial literacy. (3 min read)

How leaders can deliver the social connection most of us crave - Disconnection is not a personal failure, but a systems challenge — and an opportunity for employers to strengthen our social fabric. This fascinating read looks at a report highlighting the Six Points of Connection in 2026 and what actually makes connection possible in daily life. (6 min read)

Unstuck Your Creative Self, the Smallest Possible Way - “You spend your younger years with the time and the dreams of doing creative work. Then you get a decade into your career as a creative (the “creative class”—remember that phrase?), and you start to wonder where the creative part is. You spend months pitching a project, only to discover the most creative element is picking the photographer, maybe grabbing half a day on set, before returning to RFPs that fall on deaf ears.” (4 min read)

What the rise and fall of Julius Caesar can teach us about EQ - Julius Caesar conquered Gaul but his emotional intelligence was pitiful — and there’s plenty we can learn from his leadership deficiencies. (7 min read)

The Omnipotence Dilemma - We’ve reached a point where, for the first time in humanity’s history, virtually anyone can work on anything using AI tools. The problem is we find ourselves starting lots of things but finishing few. To beat this, it helps to think like a scientist running experiments. An experiment has a clear scope. It has a duration. It produces learning whether it succeeds or fails. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

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